The Roads of Friendship: Ravenna – Jerash – Pompei
«Not stone, brick, or steel: the bridges Ravenna Festival has been building since 1997 with The Roads of Friendship are those that music, the only universal language, can create. Invisible but no less real or necessary, those bridges are an invitation to dialogue, an offer of sympathy, a symbol of hope. And sometimes, along the routes of Friendship, one discovers that a bridge already exists: the one, for example, built by the generosity of the Jordanian people, who over the last decade have welcomed hundreds of thousands of Syrian (and other) refugees.
The concert Riccardo Muti will conduct on July 9 in Jerash, in the Roman theatre of the ‘Pompeii of the East’, pays tribute to this extraordinary spirit of brotherhood. Significantly, after the debut at the Pala De André in Ravenna (July 7) and the concert in Jordan, The Roads of Friendship will reach the Teatro Grande in Pompeii (July 11)».
This year the Festival took the opportunity of the centenary of Italo Calvino’s birth to name its 34th edition The Invisible Cities, and, as the introduction of The Roads of Friendship 2023 furthermore explains, «the common thread of the shared Roman past and its archaeological heritage links two long-buried cities – one by the ashes of Mount Vesuvius, the other by the sands of the desert – to Ravenna, whose port of Classe emperor Augustus chose for his fleet in the eastern Mediterranean».
On all three stages, Maestro Muti’s baton will unite the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra and the Cremona Antiqua Choir with musicians of the National Music Conservatory of Amman in the second act from Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, ‘Casta diva’ from Bellini’s Norma, and Brahms’s Schicksalslied.
In Jordan, Ravenna Festival will also visit the Za’atari refugee camp on the Syrian border, for a music moment with Syrian diaspora artists and musicians living in the camp, who will be given new instruments as a gift.
The dialogue between Italy and Jordan takes place in the name of mosaics as well, through the exchange between the Municipality of Ravenna and the Jordanian city of Madaba, where extraordinary Byzantine and Umayyad mosaics are preserved; another precious segment in the journey that starts from the Pala De André in Ravenna.
The concert in Jerash is made possible by the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (which, in line with the strategy of strengthening cultural cooperation between Italy and Jordan, will open a new Italian Cultural Institute in Amman) and the assistance of the Italian Embassy in Amman, the support of the Emilia-Romagna Region, and in collaboration with the Jordan Italian Forum for Cooperation.